People Don’t Buy Products, They Buy Better Versions of Themselves

There is the famous story about Steve Jobs when he invented the iPod and everyone in the news and the rest of the tech industry scratched their head a little. MP3 players had been around for quite a while, what was so different about the iPod?

Of course, people argued many things were different, but one of the key aspects was how Jobs marketed and presented it:

“1,000 songs in your pocket”

When everyone else was saying “1GB storage on your MP3 player”, telling people about the product, Apple went ahead and made you a better person, that has 1000 songs in your pocket.

In particular, the image itself proved to be popular—understandably. It’s a great way to describe clever marketing that focuses on benefits rather than features.

I’ve heard people talk about using benefits instead of features in marketing, but I’ve always struggled to understand the difference. For this post, I explored this in a bit more detail and dug up some examples of companies who do this well.

When I read about this some more, I found some great blog posts that broke it down even further. One from the ideacrossing blog describes features as “what your product or service has or does” and benefits as “what the features mean and why they are important.” In fact, oftentimes products contain features, that are absolutely unused, which can be a big source of waste.

So, it seems like features are the “what” of your product or service, while benefits are the “why” behind it.

I also found a really neat, old marketing quote that’s often attributed to Theodore Levitt (he attributes it to Leo McGinneva in this paper), on why people buy quarter-inch drill bits:

They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.

So, the customer wants to make a quarter-inch hole for some reason. They buy a quarter-inch bit for their drill in order to achieve this. Marketing the drill bit based on its features (it fits into your drill) wouldn’t be as successful in this case as marketing it based on the benefits (you can create a quarter-inch hole).

So after all of this reading, I finally distilled the difference into a sentence that I think makes it easy to distinguish between features and benefits:

A feature is what your product does; a benefit is what the customer can do with your product.

But hey, enough the theory, let’s dig up some amazing examples from some of the best companies out there:

Some great examples of companies making you a better version of yourself

To get a better idea of how this works in practice, I thought it would be useful to take a look at some well-known companies who use benefits in their marketing strategies. Here are a few that I found:

Evernote can’t remember everything for you. In fact, it can’t remember anything—it’s software. What it does is offer features to let you save and organize things. Remembering everything is what you can do with Evernote—the benefit!

Twitter: Start a conversation, explore your interests, and be in the know.

Twitter has used a few different benefits in their tag line on the homepage but they’re still focused on benefits. Each of these three things is something you can do with Twitter. Not a feature of the product. Of course, for saving time on Twitter with scheduling your Tweets and seeing analytics, I hope you’ll still find Buffer useful.

I love this one, because it’s so clever. In just six words, the Nest Thermostat tagline tells you what the biggest benefit is (you’ll save energy), and something about what makes the product unique (it’s well-designed; it’s “a beautiful thing”).

LinkedIn has gone even further by referencing the customer in their tagline. Saying “Be great at what you do” makes it clear that the idea is you’ll be great at what you do if you use LinkedIn. It’s very customer-focused, rather than pushing features of the product or company mottos front-and-center.

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Belle is the first Content Crafter at Buffer and co-founder of Exist. She writes about social media, startups, lifehacking and science.

E-r-d-i

This is a great approach to marketing but its also a great approach to business. You’re not just selling your company and its numbers and successes. You’re giving the customer a clear vision of where they will be with you and your work. This is a pretty neat approach.

themanuelrc

Brilliant post. Thanks Buffer 😉

Heather YamadaHosley

Ah, now I see why you were asking about examples yesterday. 🙂 In the Nest one, the image says, “Saving energy is a beautiful thing.” But you mention “money” in your text…

This is an excellent topic to write on as a majority of relationships, whether they be between individuals, companies & individuals, or companies & companies, are all about displaying your benefit to the other party either in an obvious or subconscious manner. Thanks for covering such an interesting area, Belle!

Great take on this Belle! Now I’m thinking how can I apply that to fundraising? Any ideas?

Chris Conner

Belle, Thanks for posting this. Of all the things I have read about marketing in the last year, “People buy better versions of themselves” is the one that sticks with me. I keep it in mind for myself as well as my clients.

But why does it work?

Because the features may be impressive, or interesting, but a benefit is satisfying. It has a stronger emotional impact. The customer feels what it would be like to use the product or service. Making customers feel something, as Steve Jobs did so well, is the key to great marketing.

Clark Lagemann

Another awesome post… the old saying I continuously think of: Features tell, benefits sell.

Nice work on this one Belle. I especially like the Nest Thermostat claim. Good copy is hard to write. Good AND short even harder. They killed that one.

Sandy

I have heard the 1/4″ hole quote before and did an oh, duh when I realized “it is what you can do with our product”. Thanks, Belle!

Violetta L Wong

Thanks. I just need it.

Kim

Not sure who said it, but I find “You’re not selling a bed, you’re selling a good night’s sleep” always helps me to remember the difference between features and benefits!

David Schuller

This is an excellent post. I was struggling with how would be the best way to market some products on my blog. This answered my question.
Thanks

Dave from scarborough

And once you are used to selling in this manner how do you adjust to the critical thinker?

Lemna Mano

People are smart! Wow kind of feeling! It is nice to see things happening smarter around the world!
And @Buffer – You are doing a wonderful work! This is the first day I am going through your blog and it is really cool! Keep going!

Ange Andria

I think we could dig even deeper, being more specific, because it helps to define who our customers are even better. At least 5 levels of “So that”.

“They want quarter-inch holes” > I kind of disagree in the sense that I don’t think that a quarter-inch hole is a benefit either. You don’t achieve anything because you made a hole. You don’t reach a better version of yourself. Also, not everyone needs a quarter-inch hole to achieve the same thing.

So at each level we could define our customer’s persona event better (qualify or segment).

They want quarter-inch holes > **So that** they can put a shelf on their wall
They want to put a shelf on the wall > **So that** they can put their favorite books on it
They want to put books on a shelf in their living room > So that they always have the books that they love in front of them and think about reading those
> So that they read more often and can relax, take time for themselves, enjoy that quiet place in their *home* while the children are asleep/or after sunday’s lunch, siesta time, etc etc…

I would say that’s closer to what a potential customer could imagine. That’s what triggered his need for access to his books, a shelf, a hole, quarter-inch bits.

I would love to hear your opinion about it.

Ange

woops, sorry. I didn’t think the image would be embedded and displayed that large

andrewjgrimm

No matter what drill bit I buy, I won’t have the cleavage that model has. Sex sells? No thanks.

Graham

i agree that nobody wants a hole any more than they want a drill bit. however, when you pursue that path to the end you always end up with “be happy”, which is not very helpful to the product manager at black & decker.

so the question is, when do you stop?

Konrad Sanders

Top notch post here Belle – and some great, inspiring taglines, thanks! Being a copywriter I of course agree with all of this. Verbs like ‘imagine’ and ‘picture’ are commonly used in my field (and powerfully so) to help customers visualize how awesome their lives could be with your product or service. PS. I’m loving this Mario analogy!

Great post Beth. I just love watching Steve Jobs presentations – they all feature the benefits – the laptop that fits in an envelope, the ipod that carries 1000 songs in your pocket. The man was THE genius of SIMPLICITY and cutting straight to our “why”. Thanks for sharing this post – brilliant examples.

Perfect! When marketing your brand, discuss how it can elevate those who use it; how using this product will make you better than before. Everyone seeks to become a better person, so allow your brand to show them how it can happen!

darshu

Thank you for this great post. Very Marshall Mcluhan in the best way possible. It just hit us this week — after being told so by one of the CEOs using us — that we turn people into the best managers they’ve ever met, so this comes in perfect timing for us (at daPulse.com).

Awesome post! Great examples of brands that use benefits in their communication rather than features. Steve Jobs once said that Apple is building the tools to amplify human abilities. I think that this quote reflects the thesis in this article in the best possible way. People are buying tools to amplify their skills, to do something better, faster, easier or in the excellent fashion. All the fashion houses are good examples as well. Thanks for sharing Belle!

One I would like much more would be “All your thoughts, whenever you want, wherever you are”.

jdarko82

People are buying a result, a benefit — an outcome that is very self-serving to
the end user. People could care less why you’re in business, that you need to make payroll, or whatever.

The only reason they deal with you (or they let you deal with them) is that to some extent they see an advantage in it for themselves. The clearer and more powerful you are at expressing, articulating, demonstrating, illustrating and comparing how you render that advantage better than anyone else you deal with — the more business you will get.

There are only three ways to grow any enterprise. You either increase the number of customers, increase the unit of sale, or increase the amount of times a customer will buy from you.

Most people don’t understand that everyone generates leads. The Yellow Pages are leads. Somebody you meet can be a lead. Leads have several critical factors. What they cost is only one. The conversion rate is the second factor. The unit of sale is the third, and the residual value the fourth. Until you know all of those factors, you don’t know anything.

What matters is, what do they bring in the first sale? How often do they come back? What’s the profit on them? You have to analyze all these factors. A lot of people who generate leads don’t analyze them, but the few that do standardize them all together.

Most people have never analyzed the origin of the business, and it’s a two-prong question. Where people are coming from and where repeat business is coming from? It is trite, but the 80/20 rule is probably true.

Probably 20 percent of your customers are bringing you 80% of your business. If you believe you have what it takes to succeed with my guidance, I’m going to do something absolutely “unheard of. I’ll provide you all with a Complimentary business card design for the next 48 hours, a Free branding strategy & my latest E-Book entirely gratis.

– Cheers

Simon De Baene

Great article. It sounds easy, but so many companies are missing it completely.

I think the beer commercials are the best at selling the “why”. If you drink our beer, you will be surrounded by a bevy of beautiful young ever-smiling people!

Antonio Dominion

Thank you for this awesome post! Until now, the differences between feature and benefit were a bit hazy for me. But your post fully clarified it for me. Thanks again! 🙂

In fact, during my sales training as part of my training to become a Pacific Bell Service Representative, we were taught to always give the customer a WIIFM (pronounced: wiff- em). This, from the customers’ point of view, means What’s In It For Me?

I hope this knowledge might help someone else in a sales situation, they just need to remember to give the customer a WIFFM!

~Antonio Dominion Photography Studios

Jon

I think you can take it one step further, do people really want “quarter inch holes” or do they want the result of that hole… a new swing set = “happy child that loves Daddy”. A marketers, going deeper into the benefits, to find the meaning is worthwhile.

This is the sixth article in our new series with advice on building a business, company culture and life-hacking from Joel, CEO here at Buffer. You can grab all posts here. Choosing a name is one of the parts of a startup I find the most difficult. It’s also something you can easily get hung up on. We […]